>> i was never -- >> anything else? you had something burning in you to ask. no? all right. anybody? let get it started, man. no one else? any raiders here? >> got shut down because the big army ant teaking anymore. >> anymore what? battalion? >> yeah. >> all those -- -- when he changed from everyone foe selection and then getting --d filling up the 82nd and 101st, the armies with have an excess of infantrymen with zero skills. >> are you staying? >> i'm trying to go to selection. >> good for it, man. go for it. >> schnell. >> schnell.

i got bad memory loss, man. >> it's all good. >> i have to see a face. never forget face putter in -- i forgot in the name of the guy we talking about. >> pierce. >> i'm serious. get it started. >> ready to talk about the book. >> definitely. >> are you guys? >> let's too it, man. >> all right so i was going to give everyone -- front row, stand up and come up and then' -- >> okay. >> oh, okay. got it. daily. >> and this is booktv on c-span 2. it's television for serious readers. here's a quick look at our primetime lineup for tonight. begin agent 7:45 p.m., political cartoonist gary trudeau

discusses his mock struck pie downs bury "and hissy of donald trump as character. then at 8:30 we sit down with senator jeanne she heaven that talked about the book that influence head lower and arrive, and former attorney general a alberto gonsales generals booktv for ore "after words" program at 9:00 p.m. his book is called "through faith and allegiance" about his time as attorney general in george w. bush administration. and at 10:00 p.m., john strauss beau details how new york city was both helpful and hurtful to the union during the civil war. we wrap up our sunday primetime lineup at 11:00 p.m. with a along at the positive and negative aspects of studying abroad. that all happens tonight on c-span 2's booktv.

>> next on boar "after words" protect you hear from rosa brooks discussing her book, "how everything became war and he military became away. "she exams he change in how america fights wars and the growing role of the u.s. military in ongoing conflicts. >> well, it's great to be here with you and to discuss this book, which is a long time in the making and a great resource for folks who are interested in civil military issues in the united states, and some of the contemporary issues that we're facing with regard to the role of the military. let's start with one of the key premises of the book, which have we in the united states back to dependent on our military to solve problems? >> guest: i don't know if we have become too dependent but have become very dependent on

the military to solve problems. one of the thats that blew my mind when i got the pentagon and you have spent longer in that world -- but when i got there i, like many americans, assumed that what the military does is prepares to fight wars in the traditional sense of blowing stuff up and shooting at people, and obviously the pentagon does do that but it was just amazing to me how much else people in the military now do. whether it's planning programs to prevent sexual violence in the congo, to programs to encourage microenterprise amongg afghan women or training judges or producing radio call-in shows. you name it. somebody at the pentagon wasdu doing it. n it was half amazing and inspiring and halve a little bit scary. >> host: well, you very much in the book talk about your experiences inside the pentagon you. go beyond that. but let's pick up on how the

heck did you end up at the pentagon? lawyer by training. your parents were activists in the '60s and that was the last place they probably expected to find their daughter. you were a writer. talk about coming to the pentagon, what brought you there, and what led you to write a book about that experience. >> guest: you know, never thought i would end up at the pentagon. never thought i would end up marrying an army officer. i did come from antiwar family. some of my earliest memories involve dish remember at age 4 in central park sitting on the grass, celebrating the end of the vietnam war. my parents had taken me to the end of vietnam war celebration and protesting when i was 10, the requirement that young men register for the draft. i think for me what ended up happening, coming from a family that was very critical of the u.s. military and the way it had been used, was that i ended up working after law school for various human rightsts

organizations and i ended up for a time at the state department and the human rights bureau, and i found myself in places such as kosovo and sierra leone during the civil war, and in kosovo, nato forces led by the u.s. had had used air power to stop an imminent ethnic cleansing campaign in sierra leone, british military interventionam helped bring to a close a really horrifically brutal civil war and so for the first time in mys life more or less i was boast meeting lots of people who were in the military and seeing up close the fact that military power could be idea for good. and it really shook up my own stereo types in a lot of ways and left me much more aware that it's a more complicated story. so i think for me that then led to an interest in the role of the military in post conflict reconstruction, led to a book

that i did previously on military efforts to build the rule of law in the wake of conflicts and how i ended up at the pentagon, quite frankly, was so eager to work in at the obama administration, i was doing what lots of people in washington were doing, when he was elected, which i sending e-mails to everybody i knew, saying i would like to sweep the floors, make the coffee, raley would like to be part of this and one of the people e-mailed was michelle flournoy, who was then knock nailed to be undersecretary of defense for policy and she was the first person foolish enough to say, sure, okay, i think we can make michigan work at the pentagon. come work for me there. >> host: so, i want you 20 describe what your job was, what range of issues that led you to see while there, because it's a really fascinating portfolio you have. i went in without really a clear portfolio at all and i had worked obviously for human rights groups and on rule of

law, humanitarian law and human rights issues. was also a writer. had been working on a weekly column for "the los angeles times" for several years at that point, and when michelle flournoy brought me in, she said to me, i don't quite know what you should do but why don't you start out by -- you can be my speech writer. i don't have a speech writer. and help me with speeches and congressional testimony, and we'll figure out what else you should do as time goes by.we wil and for me it was a terrific education because i hadn't particularly wanted to be writing speeches but one of the good things, and the bad thing about writing speeches and testimony for someone is that you have to learn a little bit about everything, and you have to go out and you have to talk to everybody, and you're constantly moving from issue to issue, so one week you're on afghanistan and you're helping

to draft testimony on afghan and the next week it's pirate si so it was a crash course in major policy issues and what happened over time, as you know, michelle was a fantastic boss, and she was the kind of boss that says whatnot do you want to be doing? why? okay, tell me how you want me to help you do that. and over time, i said, i'd like to work on some of the rule of law and human rights issues that are in my background that i care about a lot. and so i began to work on those issues as well, which was really satisfying. >> host: so in that set ofas experiences while you were there, obviously i'm sure these ideas in this book came throughout your history as youdi talk about your time in kosovo and -- what in that set of pentagon experiences criminalizes for you this dilemma you talk about in the book -- how the military became

everything. were there experienced that started to crystallize for you the problem? >> guest: yeah in some weighed i suppose. 2009 many portfolios i took on at the pentagon was looking at the defense department's strategic communication and information operations program. and that was an area, too, where who knew. the defense department wag does pretty much everything you can think of from sponsoring peace concerts in africa and producing soap owe operas and comic books and do more stuff that is in the covert realm, designed to influence and i was both again impressed by this range of projects and impress bid many of the people i met and yet also couldn't help but think, wife -- why is the pentagon doing this? that was the attitude of my colleagues from the state

department who had come over and would get quite angry and sigh why are you peep doing this stuff? you don't know what you'rerey doing, you shouldn't bev doing it. we should be doing it. it sort of put up front and central the dilemma of well the pentagon is doing it because somebody feels that eneutz needs to be doing it. whether that right or wrong is another question but somebody peoples the united states needs to be doing it. the civilian agencies, state usaid, have in many ways been defunded for a period of many decades and have really lost a lot of their ability to put programs on that they might have had during the peak of the cold war, for instance, which means that the white house and congress turned to the military because the military is big and it's got people who you can send anywhere in the world on very short notice and they don't get to say, no, i don't feel like going to iraq or are -- they just have to do it. the not true of the civilian agencies. so it turns into a vicious

circle where the more we look around and we say, wow, it's a complex world, threats don't competely packages, not just from foreign military. they're coming from cyber space, from terrorism, they're coming in the future from bioengineered viruses who are knows what. if we want to respond and if we wanted to be preventing conflict, then the united states has to be doing everything. we have to be addressing the root causes of terrorism, we have to be looking at political repression. looking at economic development. we have to be looking at the information domain and cyber space. the more you've do that, you need member to do it, you ask the military to do it, the more the military does it the less you need the civilian agencies, the moral you have to fund the military and five it resources so to do, the less the civilian agencies can do and that becomes the vicious cycle. >> host: right. there have been efforts over time, secretary rice, secretary clinton, both two of the state secretaries who tried to grow

capacitying, strengthen the civilian role and rule in many of these areas. are those kind of efforts doome to failure? is there a general inequity? sunny have mixed feelings. think like many good liberalled started out thinking, the military just shouldn't be doing this stuff. we need to rebuild the capacity of the civilian sector, and it is quite shocking how little funding the state department gets relative to the military. but over time i became -- i don't know whether you call this more's mess stick or more crazily optimistic. depends on your perspective. in the early years of the obama administration, both president obama himself and then defense secretary robert gates and then secretary of state hillary clinton, made a lot of speeches saying we need to rebuild the civilian sector, we node restore more funding to the civilian sector and gates said, from the

perspective of the secretary of defense, the military can't do its job unless we have civilian partners who can do their job, and we don't want to be doing all these crazy governance development and so an. want civilians to do them well, and nothing really happened. nothing really changed at all. i think i eventually found myself shifting to a position where they would say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different to happen that nerve washington was saying we need to rebuild the civilian sector, real ya without to do that and never happens and i started asking people, do you think this is like lie to happen in our political lifetime? any political will in congress to change this? and everyone would say, no, not really. at a certain point it seems to me you got to stop running out and saying, this ought to happen if it's not going to happen. world peace ought to happen but if it's not going to happen chaotic we do? the plan b become if we just

have to accept the political reality is this -- congress is not going to say, let's triple the budget. trip the foreign assistance budget.ud if the military for the foreseeable part us going to be continued to asked to take on this witness range of tasks let's make sure the military guess at it. make sure the skills and years of expertise you need becomes resident in the military whichar hat profound implications for everything how we cute to how we train, to how we manage military personnel, the military personnel system. >> host: are there places where you experienced that we have done that well, where the military has been given a task and the training and the resources and to leadership have followed and then obviously are there wases where you're more worried that they haven't -- >> guest: i think we're doing

better on things like cyber. partly because that's closer to traditional military exceptsy and electronic warfare for instance. when it comes to the governans and economic development sphere, that the military is still really floundering in part because the civilians floundered too. it's just harold. not that the military ifs band it's. it's part live that me tailer is bad at it because everybody is bat it's it. but that being said, we obviously still recruit and train military personnel as if the world has not changed that much since 1955. and there are exceptions. we heart shoulder courses and loaded of people trying really hard to figure out how to adapt. what we need to do differently. got myself in hot water a few years ago because i wrote a tongue in cheek kole plumb for foreign policy magazine, arguing

that we ought 0 -- military ought to start recruit a little aarp conferences, the american association for of retired people. and i was joking, partly, at least, but the more serious point is that the u.s. military still recruits as if this is the 19th century and what what we 1 need are brawny young men, and there's nothing wrong with brawny young men, and some of our military personnel, as we speak, are out there crawling around in the dirt and carrying heavy packs and doing exactly what infantrymen have done for centuries more or less. but we're in a world now where already 8 a 5% of military personnel north in combat, occupational specialties. anywhere various types of support roles little even those in combat roles may not ever be deployed into combat, or if they are they may find themselves work ago on governance project or economic development projectp and if you know for a fact that

many of the service members are going to be asked to do everything from wright computer code, to designing radio call insure soap operas, well, why are we still focusing all of of recruiting energies as if they're all going to be infantrymen. you still need them but make we need to think differently about the kinds of skill sets we want to bring into the military, if we either need to bring them in or need to grow them when they're there. how do we make surely we have the military personnel system that lets i bring people in and out to get needed skills in, that lets military personnel go out, work at google, work, a at big company or university and come back in without harm to they're careers. we have this very ridged system still and it's not serving us that will at a moment in timeth when we need much more flexibility and we need a really wide range of skills.

>> host: right. the other major premise in your book is not just how thepi military became everything but how everything became war and there's a human rights lawyer, i have a feeling that's the issue set that is -- that has been dearest to your heart. so, on that issue set, i wonder if you can talk about coming in in 2009, the bush administration ended, it's a very complexion landscape in terms of issues about detention policies, issues about direct targeted attacks by the the direct united states.

made a decision to view alli our responds to the 9/11 attacks through the legal framework of war. going to be considered an armed conflict for legal purposes and the legal framework we have, both in terms of international law and domestic u.s. law, legal framework we have for war is really different than the legal framework we have for the rest of the time, peace, not war. whatever you want to call it, ordinaries life, and basically to put it in a nutshell, during

peacetime, the state is not supposed to go around killing people. you only get to kill them if you have put them on trial, you have an elaborate judicial process, you have to present evidence. in peacetime we have lots of safeguards for due progression and to protect individual rights in peacetime we're very intoll rapt of government secrecy, weto require loot lotts of checks and balances for anything the executive branch does that would infringe on individual rights in wartime it's the opposite.nc in wartime, -- peacetime you till somebody, you're charged with murder in war crime if you're a combatant and you kill another combatant you might get a meta. you're supposed to do that. you have combatant immune you don't get prosecuted for killing the enemy because you're supposed to. once you've shift to that legal framework for war, we tolerate a lot more government secrecy,

government coercion, government use of lethal together andmo opposite the bush administration sort of made that decision to say, ah-ha, terrorism is in that box we call war, and the legal rules for war will apply to everything with do, you've got things like u.s. plucking up people all over the world outside of combat zones and's knea, nigeria, afghan, saying we think they're terrorists and sending them to in many cases to guantanamo, saying they're not entitled to lawyers northh entitled to any kind of due process and early on you get lots of people 'journalis and u.s. officials saying. wait, wait. how do we know who these peopler center some of the are not who we think they are about if glory the law of war, box, you don't have to -- don't have to do very much to find out. you can just say, hey, it's war. mistakes happen, get of it.

so we started kind of drifting into this world in which the magic act of waving a wand and saying i'm going to call this war, suddenly meant that the u.s. government was doing things that in other other universe would have been shocking, eg lid rally kidnapping people off the streets in countries with which we north at war and imprisoning them without any access to due process and just saying, too bad, tough luck, often not even acknowledging who we were keep organize why. that really shocked me. as an american citizen. was shocked our government was doing that. and president obama really campaigned in 2007 and 2008 in many ways on a platform of rolling back what he saw as those excesses. some of his very first acts when he was sworn in very first die daz were to issue other series of executive orders banning thet torture, saying that he was

going to close guantanamo, andhe creating ave e review produce to figure out how to close gone and i came into the pentagon thinking, okay, he is going fix this. he is going to fix this. >> host: right in fact in 2009 issue think it was, relatively soon after you get there you do take a trip down to guantanamo. >> guest: i did. >> host: we talk -- can you talk about that experience. >> guest: it was very strange. have you been down? >> host: i have. >> guest: it's very beautiful. a very strange juxtaposition of this barbed wire and armed guards with this incredible physical beauty. it's a tropical island. and it's quite jarring. i think what struck me most about guantanamo, other than the surreal qualities of resort by the sea with barbed wire and seeing a terrorist mississippier -- master mind on the stairmaster. which was just kind of go, huh? wow.

what struck me most was that the problem by 2009, the problem with guantanamo wasn't guantanamo, wasn't the conditions. by that time the physical conditions for detainees were substantially better than many stateside american prisons, the period in which there were allegations of just mistreatment of detainees was over. but what was troubling about guantanamo was just this sense of, here we have people who at that point had been detained by the united states for eight years, no charge for most of them no trial, increasingly our own government research suggesting many of the people were -- had been plucked up by mistake and shouldn't have been there in the first place, and yet they were there with no foreseeable prospect of release. and that still shocks me at bit. it shocked me when president

obama eventually sort of embraced the idea of indefinite detention because of future dangerousness. >> host: the one thing wanted to draw from your book you come back from this trip and write in the book that you had tried to write about this issue inside your own chain of command and you said if we were con vicinitied some detainees were dangerous there were alternatives to hold theming indefinitely. key release them subject to electronic monitoring, and in the end i concluded the risk of releasing potentially dangerouss detainee, not nonexistent was outwait bid the must tell risked with the docking of preventive detention framework. you go on to talk about how you sought to wish that viewpoint in inside the inner agency process as we like to call it in washington, both inside the pentagon and more broadly, and in the end, after some time you certain of decided i'm going to

give up on this. i'm not making headway. >> guest: i got absolutely nowhere. >> host: , can you talk with some hypedsight, there are things you think somebody wouldn'ts to make change, who comes in with that idea and with the strength of background, legal background, and training, that you had, and the experience of actually going down and being at guantanamo, that conveys some at -- some amount of credibility. how can someone make change inside that system or is it incredibly hard? sunny it ain't credibly hard, and i would be interested in hearing your own thoughts on this because you were also in that a position inside the pentagon where you were struggling to push forward various reforms and some citiedded and some of. the got stuck. the u.s. government is a massive bureaucracy, and there are good things about that and bad things. the good thing is that it is in

many ways a brake on crazy ideas because you have presidents come and go, political appointees the people they have put into place come and go, but you have people who will be there for years and have a lot of experience and sometimes a lot of wisdom. and can put the brakes onto put craziness, on the other hand sometimes those same people put the brakes on good inknow vacations. for all kinds of complicate reasons and i do think that on that particular issue, issue of detakenee policy and what should happen at guantanamo, that it's hard to unwinds bureaucracy opt you've create and it in 2009 there had been eight years of setting up the elaborate apparatus within the military to deal with detainees, and there were people whose careers were deeply invested in that, and rolling it back turned out to be really hard particularly when many of the people entrusted early on with saying, how do we change this process, were the same people who had helped implement the

process. so i think it got bogged down and president obama ended up deciding that he had other priorities, healthcare reform and so on and that the amount of political capital that he would have needed to put into this was just -- wasn't willing to put it in. maybe that was the right decision i given awesome the things he toed juggle. the thing is care about. he has other fish to fry, too. but i think he ended up deciding 0, i'm just not going to fight this one. >> host: right. and another area that you were very involved with the pentagon, subsequently, and in this same vain of applying legalwork in this not war space was targeted attacks outside combat zones zo most people think about with drone attacks. talk about -- you talk in the book about drones -- how you

find again the legal framework working if it is, and it's troubling to you. >> guest: so, this goes back to the same set of reasons that we've gotten into a situation where the military is doing so many nontraditional things. right? that the world is complicated. we -- the threats, the security threats that the u.s. faces now don't competely packaged and, oh, it's russia or, oh, it's china, or, oh, its germany and you can tell they're coming because there are whole bunch of people wearing uniforms driving tanks are rolling towards us that increasingly we're facing threat that cross borders, that may not have anything to do with the formal decisions made by states or their militariesful we thieves loosely organized networks. we have cyber threats and so forth. and and they don't look like what we normally think of as crime because sometimes these are threats that can cause death or destruction on a scale that historically is associated with

the u.s. of military force by states. but they don't look like war, either. and if you decide that you're going to -- the problem is --ec one way to put it would be to say we have a world in which there are threats along this whole continuum, from traditional masker state-on-state armed conflict at one end of the continuum, on the eend we have individual crime. a guy drives a truck through a crowded nice how much do we categorize that? so we have threats alonging this continuum, with a big area in between, traditional war, but we have legal system that doesn't allow for in betweenness, legaln system that says pick one. either it's war in which case you get this set of rule order it's not war and you get different set of rule that are some ways diametrically opposite. we don't know how, i think,

anymore to decide, does the terrorist -- who is -- what is an armed conflict? what's a war. what a weapon is? the truck a weapon used by the guy in nice who killed so manyny plame? an airplane? a box cutter? what is a combatant. somebody who doesn't belong any military who may never carry a traditional weapon but mayber involved in plan organize support organize aiding some kind of plot that will eventually hurt people? do we have any threshold level how people they have to word, how soon? we have no idea basically so we're increasingly making these kind of arbitrary decisions about should we consider this person over here a kole bat tenant or some buy who may or may not be up to something we don't like but isn't a combatant in a war. if with decide that ease people

are combatant inside an armed conflict and we have a targeted strike against them, whether wen use a drone or something else, there's nothing new. it's nothing different than an american soldier getting off a boat on the beaches of normandie and shooting at german soldiers. nothing new here you. don't need to have a court sign off on it, be crazy, et cetera. rainfall wartime killings of enemy combatants, no ethical upon almost. o. if it's not a war and not sure the person-a-combatant and we kill them, u.s. kills enemy yemen or libya or pakistan or wherever, we just murdered some guy. the united states just murdered somebody based on cease credit heed that it's not will tolling acknowledge and that's shock. we want to know the difference between war and not war but right now we have a legal framework that makes you choose and both choices look like bad choices. that i think is the fairly profound dilemma we're in, and what we have been doing is sort of piling more and more into

that war category because frank live it's convenient for the government. it's much more convenient to be able to say, i don't have to acknowledge this. i don't have to give you've the reasons. just trust me it's always easier for the executive branch to say that. >> host: one of the thing that you write about that is related to that is if one thought this is a period of time -- this is going to close a chapter, that closes and we go bang to a neat war/peace dichotomy that would be one thing, but your argument is that this is not end and in fact that's space of not war,th the goop in between war and peace -- the gap in between war and peace, which we don't have a good term for -- is enduring. can you talk about where due you think we're going with the? do you see a way in which we can get back to the old way? and if not, if ever there was an old way, you know, of it atf nowsy just in our mind order do you think we need to change how we think about the -- >> guest: i think we need toto

change how we think about it. this neat unless of these legal categories was alwayse nearne overstated. even during the last big state on state conflict, world war ii, there were on the marginswar ii definitional problems. partisans, people whoing nor the laws of war, natz eu si -- nazis, friends. h what happened happened in the seven decades since the end of world were 25 we have gone from a situation where there are lot of exception's on the margin to the situation where the exceptions are overwhelming the norm. o that the norm for u.s. troops at the moment is to be involved in the sort of murky space between traditional all-out state-on-state conflict and peace. and i can't see that changing. and it's a huge institutional challenge for the military because the fact that these new kind threats, these more inco

it's thats are emirling doesn't mean the old threat goes away. you still have to worry about tray digsal mail tear force and you have to worry bit this other in between stuff. so that's an enormous challenge in terms of thinking about how we prepare. how any institution or nation operates there. but i do think the new stuff is not going go away. it's only going to get murky. border is not going to increase all the technological changes are pushing in the opposite direction and we are going to have to figure out both operationally for the military, and legally and morally and politically how do we operate in a world -- how do we preserve the valueses we care about, democratic accountability, rule of law, respect for individual life and liberty how do we preserve those values in a world where the old legal frameworks

development seem to give us satisfying solutions. how do we come if with new sets of rules for that murky in between space? huh do we come if with new ways to act in that murky in between space'm and that's hard. think that's the work of generations to figure that out. but i think if we don't do it we'll be in trouble. >> host: on thinking relatively recently of the case where thee u.s. government wanted to gett apple to be able to crack into an iphone that went back and forth final hill the government found their open solution. that just one example of this space continuing. how do you think the private sector fits into this picture of what was traditionally a government sphere? >> guest: right. it's going to have to fit in. if nothing else, other states, including states we view at adversaries such as russia, are being pretty creative about

exploiting that ill defined space where you move between private and public actors and don't awful know who is doing what, and sometimes you're using traditional military force, sometimes you're using propaganda, sometimes engagin' proxy use. it's all mixed together. we're going to have to get good at it. we're hampered by the fact we're not an author tear yap state. makes it a -- authoritarian state. we don't want to become one and that the challenge, we don't want to become one. if the price we bay is we back authoritarian, we lose. what's the point? i so i think that the war/peace line, the public/private line thing civilian/military lined are lined that humans drew, god can't hand them tom saying people in uniform can do these texass and is is what we called the private sect and the public

sector and only the public sector can do these things and the private sector can only do these things. c these are categories, school and political categories we create to achieve certain purposes.pe we create them to help build the kind of world that we want to live in, and we can change themi if blurring the line between public and private we worry about that, we worry about that because we worry about corruption, we worry about accountability and so forth. but there's no inherent rain you can't simply create different mechanisms for ensuring accountable and reducing corruption if you have a morerr blended kind of -- set of operations of actors. the limit is our own imagination. we get very stuck. we go, but the laugh says, such and such and so i have to put everything into this box or that box and with get all tied up in knots. but that this is an invitation to us to have a very different kind of conversation, one that doesn't start with the law and

political institutions as they are burt one that starts with what do we want to be able to do and how -- what kind of legal and political framework would be need to create to do that why at the same time protecting rights and the rule of law. >> host: for the legal community i would think it's also requirel a shift in the type of skill sets and way of thinking from layman's terms legal interpretation to legal theory or development of legal policy. have you seen progress inside the legal community, particularly with regard to national security? >> guest: i think there has been some and we are growing through hoe -- cohort lawyers and legale academics working in the pentagon and state department and other places who can kind of connect the dots between these different worlds.

but -- some of this is reallyalr hard. reinventing international institutions is really halter but some pieces of this are actually pretty easy and i think we sometimes let the fact there are lots of hard problemmed prevent us from doing anything about the relatively easy problem. so fixing international law. hard. fixing international institutions, hard. making, for instance, u.s. target strikes, drone strikes, more transparent and can'table-think that one easy. >> host: what do you want to see.y. >> guest: i would like to see see greater due process, whether a khweis sue judicial process or independent commission. we have always -- the assumption that you don't have judicial process when it comes to wartime, use of force, is premised on thal it's all like the invasion of normandie. you can't imagine a court on the beach. people are dying all around. it's just not fees illinois but when it comes to targeted strikes, in most cases, the u.s.

has been tracking someone and building in effect a case against them -- >> host: decision space. >> guest: for weeks, months, years and, it becomes feasible when the process is that long to add in additional layers of process that are outside of the executive branch. do you have issues about protecting intelligence sources and methods?s? a sure but you can clear people into it. you can figure out a mechanism that one actually strike little me as pretty easy.y. there are half a dots easy way that don't solve, don't address every last problem with every last case but get you 85% of the way to addressing the most common objections, that president obama could sign an executive order and make itpresn happen tomorrow if he wanted other. >> host: do you see patrols suspect ford something like that.. >> guest: unfortunately, no, i find that baffling he had made numerous speeches declaring his commitment to increasing transspartan si and account able and taken a few baby steps, including most recently some

declaration of certain number of civilian casualties, but he has done much less than any of the speeches suggest he would and at this point, unless he has an 11th hour, this is part of mislegacy change of heart, i don't think we'll see much progress. >> host: another area in this vein is authorization for the use of military force. we've had an ongoing or episodic debate, really inside the congress about whether there ought to be a new notification getted back to the constitutional bases for what the heck its we're doing in the world. whatever we call it. what is your thought on how that debate has progressed and whereh it needs to go? >> guest: it's had -- another one where the problem is not that the issue is just too complaining ited. the problem is lack of political will. the 2001 authorization to use military force was passed just a five days after the september 11th attacks, and essentially congress gave thell

president the authority to use force against the people and organizations that had planned or a abetted the september 11 attack for the purpose of preventing such attacks against the united states in the future. those actually in some ways fairly restrictive. the bush administration right after the attack asked congress to pass a very different authorization, one that just essentially said the president can use force against whoever he wants to to respond to this and congress had gone, no, no we want something that is narrow. we want to restrict it to use of force to go after those who were responsible for this, to prevent the same thing for happening against the united states in the future, over time, over the last 15 years, that seemingly relatively narrow legal authorization has been used most obviously and directly inappropriately to justify the u.s. use of force in afghanistan. it was then used against the

taliban, against other actorss and other states, against members of somalia's al-shabaabs organization, against members of the isis, in syria, libya, iraq. groups that didn't even exist at the time of 9/11 that had nothing to do with it that don't seem to be plotting similar attacks against the united states. >> host: not align with al qaeda. >> guest: repudiate with al qaeda and amay be mad people need to use military forcee against but we have shoe-horned this stuff into one paragraphh authorization to use force in a way that has stretchedded it sod unbelievably and i don't think there's anybody in either party who won't acknowledge that, including president obama, who even as he relies on it has said i think it's overly road and should be changed but we're in one hoof those situations where you have everybody saying it's overbroad and should be changed but nobody, including the president, willing to say, yeah,

we'll stop relying on it because we have stretched the bounds of where we can take this. and if he stopped relying on it would put congress on the spot and they would have to come up withsomething else out bit a game of chicken. deup want to be the one that says no more air strike on anybody until you get your action together, congress. and since he don't wasn't do that -- i think that would call their bluff -- nothing is likely to changite interesting nat in both during everything becomes war and military becomes everything, this backdrop, the context of sclerosis or dysfunction of lack of ability to make real political progress inside washington fits in there, both with regard to, for instance north being able to get authorizations for civilian departments to undertake missions, and thus the defense t budget and defense authorization bill becomes the vehicle for everything, and in this sense of not being able to come toonot

consensus in the national security realm around the rules that will guide us going forward, even when there's -- seems to be concept consensus that something should changed. obviously that goes beyond where you fry to go in the book but how much -- gang back to this issue is this a chapter -- do we have a chapter in the future that looks different? do you think a change in that context, growing of consensus and seriousness about resolving these issues can take to us a different place?ee >> guest: you know issue would like to see the u.s. create some sort of universal national service program. i think that's the only that that over time might help us break the kind of partisan gridlock and dysfunction and mutual distrust that has surfaced so much in this election season, for instance,

and has characterized the relations between the congress and the white house over the last eight years. >> host: what would that look like? >> guest: i would like -- there's a empty we have.world war ii which is got some truth in it, which is that the draft, mass mobilization for the draft, brought together -- you get this -- whenow a held produce-under you crete this platoon and has the italian guy from brooklyn and the jewish guy from new york and the farm boy from iowa and it's got thefrom scandinavian immigrant from north dakota, and the black -- and they all know each other and they're up suspicious of each other and come together and they're fighting nazis and bych the end of it they're all -- we're all just americans and we love each other. and there's some truth to that. that the mass mobilization did in many ways bind america going and gave a generation a common experience and a sense of common

identity, which i do think, for the next couple of decades, helped fuel a much greater degree of bipartisanshipin american politics and foreign policy. i don't think it's realistic, and nobody wants to have a military draft. we don't need one. in terms of the sheer numbers for military service at this point, but we have so many problems in this country, ranging from infrastructure problems to problems in our public schools, not to speak of the lack of foreign assistance official are officials and so forth. i would loaf to see a national service program that was mandatory for 18 months or so, for -- you had to do it some point between the ages of 18 and, say, 23 or 24 and you could choose already you wanted to do it subject to national needs go to the peace corps or vista work or be repairing bridges or teaching kids or being in theari army i i think that somebody

like that brought everybody in and milked them up geographically and ethnicallyed and in terms of class, much as the draft once did for young americans, think would be really powerful and people always say, oh, no, no that would be too expensive. don't think that's right. i think it would be expensive up front to do. but it would be a massive investment, both in infrastructure reform, and in building precise lie the kinds of skill we want theme want to nurses and teachers it's. they the only thing of thing i can think of that would shape things up and give us a fighting chance of getting past some of this -- the partisanship thatge has been so detrimental and so destructive on so many different issues.imenta >> host: some of the strongest proponents for national service have been former military, stan mcchrystal is one of those. do you think that's borne of the military experience. >> guest: i do.

here's the most amazing thing about the american military. it's got all kinds of problems but it's this institution that is capable of marshaling so much human talent so quickly, and really quite amazingly eeffectively, all things considered. there's another story in the book, major general paul eaton told me he was talking about being in afghanistan and realizing a certain point that it would be impossible to have an enduring peace with the taliban no matter how many people you killed if the afghans could not reform they'reform agricultural economy to be less dependent on opium poppies and so on. so wanted to get some civilian expertise to consult with afghan leaders on agricultural reform projects and he over simplifying his story but he calls thump department of agriculture in washington and says, hi, i'm an army general, here i am in afghan,ing you plea spend soming a cultural experts and the department of agriculture says,

we only have two of them and they're really busy and they don't want to go to afghan. and so the army goes big collective head scratch and says, wait a second. the army reserve has -- and the national guard has farmers, people who work for agricultural companies. lea find them and bring them here and a year later we had hundreds of americans reservists and national guard troops who had some agricultural backgroundy. they quite the right people? no.t some were going, i had a garden. that doesn't mean i can advise the afghans on agricultural production, but what an amazing ability for a country to be able to do that and if we can take that energy and that talent, tht incredible talent and tie versetive we have in this country and put it to work for the whole country, that would be so wonderful. >> host: so you have had your book out now for at least a few

weeks, and you -- >> guest: one week. >> host: goodness.ee i thought it was two weeks about you have had it already been written up, "wall street journal," "new york times," multiple times. and other publications. what has surprised you the most and delighted you the most abouh the reception for the book? >> guest: what mass head me happiest about it, other thane obviously every writer wants to get attention and reviews, it's sad and depressing when you've write your book and nobody reads it. but i think what has made my happist is for the most part, with a few exceptions but for the most part the response has been very nonideological. i don't see it as an ideological or partisan book at all. i see the arguments as one that don't fit neatly into democrat, republican, liberal, consecutive, and i've been gratified that by and large that's been the reception i've gotten.at's b i've gotten really positivele

feedback from people who are on the other side of the political aisle than i am. i've gotten really positive feedback from military audiences, from people in the intelligence community as well as from peel at the state department, ordinaries americans who don't work for the government at all, and that feels really nice to feel like there is a community that doesn't see these as partisan issues and that just sees this as issues we all need to care about. >> host: hough about inside your own community in you talked about across the aisle do you think inside our community,li folks who are interested in legal issues with regard to national security, that your writing, your work, beyond the book itself, that the timing is right for that community to take that next step and move to develop something kind of framework that makes sense? >> guest: i hope so. what became -- the germ of what became this book was an article

i wrote and published in 2004, and there are some fundmental ways in which i've been sayingng the same -- it's depressing when you've put -- saying the same thing for a dots years now -- dozen years now and earl on everything thought i was crazy when said the boundary line between war and peace are break down. now i don't get that anymore. now most of the time with mostst audiences i get, yeah, yeah, that is happening. that's true. you're right. the last five years if feel like there have been less people saying, that's true, but spinning in circles that would do so i hope that the book becomes a mall part of tisching that discussion over from goings around in circles to, yes, we need to change this. i hope that will happen. >> host: so, 15 year anniversary of 9/11 coming up. where do you see that next chapter going? do you think we have a continuing war on terror aheadin of us in which many of thieves

same issues will -- these same issues will arise? are there new horizons in this gap, between peace and war, that we're not yet in front of, since you're -- you were the can anywhere ray 12 years ago -- canary 12 years ago, can you give us guidance? i don't want to be a canary.. so, i think what has become more apparent in the last few years, which is a real kind of warning for everybody, including peoplee who have been in denial about these issues -- has been that other bad actors,ed aer sears are adopt -- adversaries are adopting the arguments and legal trimworks the united states has a made to do bad things don't like. to give just one example, on issues of sovereignty, i remember vladimir putin commenting some years ago in

response to some u.s. ewan lateral actions he didn't like,i the said this is a two-ended stick and the other side will come back and hit you in the face. and it did. in ukraine and in all kinds of ways, and i think that one of the things i've been saying for a long time, many others have as well, have been saying, hey, wait a minute. when we say things in the united states, like we can do detain this person indifferent enoughly because we have information we don't have to share with anybody that saves they're planning something guess it, but we won't make enough any mistake friday -- >> host: bows we're never good guy. >> guest: when with say, hey, we can send a drone or special operations team to kill a person in a foreign cop country withh which we're not at war and don't have to acknowledge we did it much less tell you why or share thed and allow you to evaluate it because, trust us, we're good and we're the good guys. well, other people hear that,

and not everybody is a good guy. and other people say, hey, united states, if you get to say, it's a secret, national security, trust us, we get tocu say it, too, and we're going to da a who lot of things you're going to hate, and i think that we -- many of us said for years, watch out, these precedents we created will come back to bite us, and in the last few years they are coming back to bite us. i think if nothing else, -- so one of two things will happen. either we'll end up in a muchen worse world in which the press dents we have set about unlat'll action -- unilateral action, using force without the buy insure from the u.n. couple, the precedence about taken detaining people bailed on secret classified evidence we won't reveal to anybody or that we killed them.

either that becomes the norm and international actors do the same thing and that's a scary world where everybody is acting that way, or it serves as wakeup call for us and we say, whoa, you're right. we want to be the country -- wee want to be the country with long been. the country that set advertise sight international norms that is setting the example that other people should follow that will make the world better. we need to get out there, we need to be saying to other states, yeah, we are going to be in this in between war and peace land forever where threats won't look lining uniformed military personnel so how do we collectively come up with some kind of international rule than institutions. that both recognize the threats are real but don't throw human rights in the rule of law out the win door in order to respond. let's figure this out. gait going to be hard. ... are going to go down but i sure do hope it's the latter path.

>> you are writing a book at a time, we are about to transition administration, people would be coming to you if they haven't already, should i go into government and follow your example and take my great principles and my background and try to make change, what do you tell people. what are the great things about going to work in the government and trying to make change and what are the hard parts. >> the great thing is you learn how the sausage factory operates and if you care about making change whether you think to yourself i want to spend the rest of my career in government or journalists or academic or work in the private sector, you have to know how it works, nobody ever really knows how nobody ever really knows how it works, but it much too complex for any of us even in and that the defense department after 26 i felt like i was finallyy beginning to lenders andnn something about how it works and i suspect he will retire